It was fab to get a tour of it from R, as she is both a docent at the museum, and also one of the artists who contributed pieces of coral to the exhibit.

The reef in DC is a satellite reef-- part of a larger project designed to shine light on what we are destroying when we are terrible environmental stewards, as when we dump trash into the ocean. You can watch a TED video about this intersection of math, craft, and environmentalism by going here. The coral reef in DC will be on display in the Sant Ocean Hall until April 24th. (There was also a lovely orchid exhibition going on, and a neat archaeology exhibit near the forensic lab and the skeleton of the Smithsonian scientist, Grover Krantz, and his irish wolfhound).

31 December 2010

So. I was at the gym yesterday, a place I need to get to more often than I was able in 2010 (that goes on the list of things to try for in 2011) reading the New Yorker on the eliptical (while I was on the eliptical, not while the New Yorker was on the eliptical) and came across this article and thought wow.

06 November 2010

A few weeks ago I was driving somewhere for work, I think out in the Western part of the state, and heard a clip on npr, like an ad, for Radiolab. Now, I love Radiolab in general, but I often don't quite manage to hear Radiolab. But this clip made me want to hear the show, enough that I tracked down their website, and lo and behold, they have podcasts of the shows. Yeay! But, despite a significant chunk of time poking around, listening to this and that, reading descriptions, putting keywords into their search engine, I could.not.find. the show I'd heard the clip from. So I signed up for their RSS feed. And *pop*. Last week the show I'd been looking for appeared.

The bit I heard is the bit with the physicists saying that it is the size of a city that matters, that the size of the city alone gives them enough information to predict a whole bunch of random things about it. There are some serious limitations to this. And there is a certain amount of pull-the-rabbit-out-of-the-hat showmanship that annoyed the hell out of me when reading Freakanomics (though they do not then try to leap to invalid conclusions, which was the next, infuriating step in Freakanomics). Still. I must admit to being kind of wonderfully astonished in listening to this strange web. It is an approach to the city, as a construct, as a creature, as a being, that is both wonderfully, mathematically ordered, and also wholly, viscerally organic.

25 March 2010

I heard this while driving around out in the wilds of the state for work, and it just blew my mind. I mean, I can't even really wrap my head around the concept, it's just so, so out there sci-fi. I'm just amazed at the things that people dream up.